Author: Andriy Tyushka, a Senior Research Fellow in the European Neighbourhood Chair at the College of Europe in Natolin (CoEN).
Executive Summary
The EU’s democracy promotion defines much of the Union’s engagement with its Eastern neighbourhood and further afield. Yet the democratization progress among the EU’s Eastern neighbours has proven to be uneven and, in some cases, even reversible. Russia’s all-out military invasion of Ukraine has only further exacerbated domestic and regional politics in Eastern Europe, making democratic reform stand second to security considerations and, thereby, opening space for a renewed push of autocratization. Against the backdrop of this critical juncture and the related arguable change in the EU’s policy from promoting to protecting democracy in its Eastern neighbourhood, this paper enquires into the established and emerging practices of the EU’s differentiated democracy support, focusing on three discernible foreign-political ‘relationalities’: enlargement, engagement and estrangement (3Es). Putting relationship at the epicentre of analysis in the EU’s democratization/counter-autocratization dynamics vis-à-vis its Eastern neighbourhood, this paper embraces the ‘relationality’ perspective and thereby brings in insights from IR to the hitherto pursued democratization and European studies approaches. In so doing, the paper compares and contrasts how the ‘values, wallets and walls’, as the three roughly corresponding rationalities of the EU’s democracy promotion and protection through ‘enlargement, engagement and estrangement’, have manifested throughout the past three decades in the EU’s relations, especially with Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia – and to what end so.
This paper posits that, in spite of notable progress in building EU-style democracies and would-be member states in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine over the past three decades, the democratic course across the countries and within the region is both unsustainable and reversible, necessitating the prioritization of democratic stabilization and protection first. This defensive turn in EU democratization/counter-autocratization politics, while long in the making, has only crystallized in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Domestic temptations of transactionalism in foreign policy, overlain by the regional trends of cresting illiberalism, great-power competition, as well as the global struggle between democracies and autocracies, make Europe’s ‘frontline democracies’ prime targets for authoritarian offensives. The EU’s shift to geostrategic enlargement towards the region helps mitigate some of the external illiberal pressures and hedge against democratic backsliding in wartime Eastern Europe. While this new relationality dimension provesto have, by and large, stabilized Ukraine’s and Moldova’s democracy building, the lack of credibility of the EU accession prospect, as well as too cautious non-enlargement conditionality pursued in the EU’s relations with Georgia, among other factors, have altogether failed to shield the country from illiberalism.
